The astute among you may have noticed that I haven't posted in awhile.  The short explanation is that I left Microsoft.  The slightly longer explanation is this: while I was doing my day job at Microsoft, I was also spending my so-called free time as the chair of Microsoft's women's organization ("Hoppers", named for Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who pioneered much of modern software).  What I discovered was that while I liked my day job pretty well, I loved working on bigger sociopolitical issues.  Microsoft, like all human institutions, has significant imperfections in how well it lives up to its values.  I spent a lot of time looking at the difference between Microsoft's ideal of itself as a true meritocracy for employees and the reality where talented, dedicated, ambitious women have more difficulty advancing than comparable men.  This is not (in my experience) generally due to intentional discrimination; it is the result of much more subtle factors than that.

At any rate, what I realized was that I wanted to take the kind of work I was passionate about and make it what I spend all of my time working on.  To that end, I applied to, was accepted to, and am currently enrolled in law school.  I intend to eventually enter the political arena.  (I thought that it might be useful, if I was going to make laws, to first understand how they actually work...)